This article reconsiders Sidney W Mintz’s classic 1964 chapter ‘Currency problems in eighteenth century Jamaica and Gresham’s Law' in light of the forms and uses of money in the colonial Caribbean slave economies and the utility of Mintz’s approach to understand today’s globalizing multicurrency economy. In considering Gresham’s Law that ‘bad money drives out good', Mintz showed how, in colonial Jamaica, money’s four functions – medium of exchange, means of payment, unit of account, and store of value – were transformed by the enslaved themselves as they worked with and in currencies circulating locally and via colonial financial networks. Further, Mintz’s ethnographic work suggests an approach to the financial practices of the poor and marginalized that highlights how their uses of money, paralleled in other arenas of their lives, confront and complicate dominating political–economic power. Directions provided by Mintz’s insights are used to analyze creative uses of money in the present world economic order.

中文翻译：

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货币的微观和宏观品质：历史上加勒比海地区及其他地区的奴隶、殖民地、地区和市场

本文根据加勒比殖民地奴隶经济中货币的形式和用途，以及 Mintz 的方法在理解当今全球化的多货币经济中的效用，重新考虑了 Sidney W Mintz 在 1964 年的经典章节“18 世纪牙买加的货币问题和格雷沙姆定律”。在考虑“劣币驱逐良币”的格雷沙姆定律时，明茨展示了在殖民地牙买加，货币的四种功能——交换媒介、支付手段、记账单位和价值储存——是如何被奴役者自己改变的。与当地和通过殖民金融网络流通的货币合作。此外，明茨的人种学工作提出了一种解决穷人和边缘化者的金融实践的方法，强调了他们如何在生活的其他领域平行使用金钱，面对支配性的政治经济权力并使之复杂化。Mintz 的见解提供的方向用于分析当前世界经济秩序中货币的创造性用途。